Eighty-Five Internet Marketing Podcast November 19th 2010. Second page of Show Notes

Contextual Relevance, Does this Make Sense?

Chris: You know, and then typically will make the whole website and the title tag will be the company name across every page and that’s just — that’s not the information on your services page is not, you know, “Bob’s Plumbing.”

Paul: Exactly.

Chris: That’s not the information that’s on the page. It’s actually plumbing services in Houston or that’s the information, so that’s what the title. It’s just like you wouldn’t name an article about plumbing services that you provide in Houston, “Bob’s Plumbing.”

Paul: Exactly.

Chris: That would be a subtitle somewhere.

Paul: Now, I could see “Houston Plumber – Bob’s Plumbing.”

Chris: Yup.

Paul: But, you know, remember these titles they’re — your title tags and your description tags are limited to a certain number of characters. I don’t have that off the top of my head but you can Google it and find it. Whether or not this is a meta tag or not, I’ve heard “yes” or “no.” We also look at alt tags for your images. You know, when you hover your mouse over a little image, a little box pops up and says what that image is, you got to have those because Google doesn’t read images. So, an image is kind of like a wasted space to a search engine if you don’t have an alt tag. And what we have on here, image titles. This is a new thing. Well, this is something that’s new to me and so pretty recently you can put an alt tag. Alt tag is a great place to put a keyword. You can actually title the image as well and now a human visitor doesn’t read it, but a search engine can read that. Guess what? Now, there’s two places you can put a keyword for an image, don’t keyword stuff, that’s being a douchebag. And H headers. Go ahead.

Chris: Yeah. Well, it’s being a douchebag and it’s just hard to read. And when we do some presentations, we do some training and when we do it we have this one little segmented line, “Thank you for visiting my Houston Plumber page where we do plumbing in the City of Houston. If you have some of plumbing issue in Houston then you should use our plumbing services in Houston for you plumbing” —

Paul: “Because we’re plumbers.”

[Laughter]

Chris: Yeah.

Paul: It’s stupid, it sucks, it’s boring and it’s like douchelicious.

Chris: Yeah.

Paul: I just made that up.

Chris: Douchelicious.

Paul: So don’t do that. So those are meta tags. You definitely want to cover those. You know, I tell people all the time, “you don’t want to spend all day on these but you do want to spend some time on it.” What else after meta tags?

Chris: Well, we kind of visit content in general, right?

Paul Okay.

Chris: So make sure that the content is good. Make sure that it has got a good density. We target between one and three percent. Some of our content writers get overzealous if we say three percent. So we really say, one percent and —

Paul: I think that one percent, they’re getting overzealous now.

Chris: ‘Cause again, you don’t want that, you know, “You are a plumbing service in Houston providing services of the plumbing nature for your plumbing equipment in your Houston home.”

Paul: Yeah.

Chris: It doesn’t read well.

Paul: And what I would say, I’ve been doing a lot of — well, I’ve done some — I tried to do as much reading every day about this topic and hopefully you guys are too. With the way — what I’m reading is that the way that Google caffeine index is content faster, deeper and more contextually that it ever has before. So you can’t just write crap and get to the first page even if it makes sense, you know, and what they’re — basically, it’s checking to see if the keyword belongs in this sentence and that’s like — it’s almost reading it like a person.

Chris: Contextual relevance.

Paul: There you go. Contextual relevancy is a big, big deal. Someone is going to say “Hey, is the density too high? Is it too low? Does this word belong in this sentence?” So, I mean if you’re using a content writer or you’re writing this yourself, you know, really make — look at your content and try — I’d say “Hey, would I want to read is this?” Ask your friend’s neighbors, “Would you want to read this? Does this make sense?”

Chris: Yeah, “How does this read?”

Paul: Yes.

Chris: And if they say “horribly” then you probably want to revisit it.

Paul: Yes.

Chris: If you’re having some challenges with content just, you know, feel free to contact us. We can, you know, give you our opinion and we’ll let you know. So, we’ll look at content and then really — and then in your list here, you’ve got headers first, really we look at content and then we’d go back to header tags and say “Okay, header tags are really the secondary level of a title.” So, you’ve got the title of your page which is “Plumbing Services” let’s say, and then you’re going to talk about specific — I don’t know, toilet plumbing services. So that would be a header tag. Google says “Oh, wow! This section is going to be about toilet plumbing services,” and — we should come up with another example.

Paul: Toilet plumbing — yeah.

[Laughter]

Chris: Another example. We’re going to be known as the Plumbing Toilet Podcast.

Paul: Toilet plumbing lovers.

Chris: So toilet plumbing services would be a header and then maybe you’re going to break that into a couple of pieces, and maybe I’m like — I don’t know, auto flush, manual flush, never flush, whatever. And those are — those would be H2 tags and Google really is — I mean, this just make sense if you think about it. Hey, an H1 tag is a more important header tag, that’s what this next section is going to be about. “Oh, wow! This section is broken into multiple pieces,” and Google gives a lot of credibility, a lot of importance to the text that’s in header tags, whether it would be an H1, H2, H3. I think we’re all the way — it goes all the way down to H5 tags. So that’s really about the layout of the page. Another thing that we do and I jotted it down here at the bottom of our list is unnumbered lists. Google gives a lot of importance to unnumbered lists and think of the reason. You know, one of the things we’ve been saying probably in our podcast from the beginning, and it’s really about SEVO, Search Engine Visitor Optimization is the least or something that actually might get read. Whereas, content and big, you know, most of the time when people see a huge a pair — a couple pair of grasps of content, they’re like “Ohh, I’m not going to — yeah.”

Paul: Yeah. You don’t want a term paper on your homepage.

Chris: Yeah, that’s a great — I like that.

Paul: I mean seriously — but you really don’t. Who wants to read that crap?

Chris: So put bullet points. Here’s the bullet points and Google knows when you do that, don’t just — make sure you’re using, you know, the right tags. It’s a URL tag and then I think it’s an LI tag or an I. think it’s an LI tag which is the List Item.

Paul: Uh-hmm.

Chris: So you’ve got an unnumbered list and the list item, and Google gives a lot of relevance to that. Make those links to the pages that are relevant for that. So if one of them again is the Toilet Service Plumbing Houston in the list on your first page on your homepage, then link that to the toilet services plumbing page. So, unnumbered list — and that’s all about structure, it’s all about ease of use, ease of readability, all of those things so —

Paul: And one more thing I’d add to content, you want to have at least 250 words of content per page I think — I thought — and I feel like this is kind of — everyone should know this by now but, you know — hey, just maybe you’re new to the podcast.

Chris: Just use the basics.

Paul: Yeah, use the basics. You got to have at least 250 words. You want to have a keyword rich, not keyword stuffed. So that’s content. Let’s go and do links. Links, links, links — sorry, no. Sorry, it was keywords, keywords, keywords.

Chris: Keywords, yeah.

Paul: [Laughs] Well, I want to say links, links, links.

Chris: After keywords, keywords, keywords, it’s links, links, links.

Paul: Links, links, links. You want to have links. Now, I have said this about five different ways and I’m going to stick with one way to talk about links. I’ll say there are inbound links, outbound links and what — ‘cause I said first “internal, external” and I think I got kind of confused. So I’m going to say inbound links, links coming from other sites into your website. Outbound links, links on your website going out to other places, and internal links, links in your — from one page of your website to another page of your website. You need to have all three, period, point blank.

Chris: Well, a lot of people used to believe and it was probably true for a period time that outbound links would kind of drain your Google juice. But let’s be honest, a really informative webpage isn’t going to have everything you want, right?

Paul: Uh-hmm.

Chris: You’re going to need to link to — I mean, even if it’s something like — you could have a huge amount of information — I don’t know, say, on immigration, right? And guess what, if you don’t have a link to the — what’s — it’s INS?

Paul: Yeah, basically.

Chris: Yeah, INS. But I think of the change but anyway — to the — in immigration governmental office then aren’t you really incomplete? I mean —

Paul: Yes.

Chris: — if you’re providing information about immigration, you know you need paperwork, you know that you may need to confirm some of the stuff that’s being said on that webpage, you’ve got to have an outbound link, so Google understands that. Google says “Hey, if you got no outbound links then really how much of a player in the internet community can you possibly be?”

Paul: Yes.

Chris: And the answer is “Not much.” I mean, you’ve got to link to other sources. We link to other places, other websites because that’s really how you contribute to the internet community. So make sure you do have outbound links. They actually — and make them high relevancy. You know, if you’re linking to an MSN article, that’s awesome, that’s actually a really good thing. If you’re linking to a FoxNews article, that’s also good.

Paul: Here’s one thing I can add and I’m looking at these notes. I’m like “Home equals core content.” I don’t even know what that means. And I wrote this piece of paper. I just don’t understand. But what I — here’s what we’ll talk about, link. This is something that is actually new in the past couple of months, link titles. Link titles are a place you can put keywords. Again, don’t be a douche, don’t spam. But there is some code, and Chuck can tell you all about it ‘cause I don’t have it memorized where you can actually, you know, like — just like an alt tag. You hover your mouse over a link and it will display a title, what that link is about. I’m starting to use them. They all just — basically, the only reason I use them was for a place to put a keyword and it helps — yeah, and it helps a visitor.

Chris: Well, it really makes sense because, you know, it’s — often you don’t have enough tech space in a link. And you want keyword-rich content there typically, and Google — I think the reason that they’re giving importance to titles is — hey, potentially they couldn’t write enough information so let them give a full on title and help us to identify what information is at the other end. Now, you mentioned Chuck and that he has got some piece of information that you didn’t have.

Paul: Yes.

Chris: So why don’t we bring out the original top position snatcher and he can kind of enlighten us on whatever we forgot.

Paul: Yeah.

[Laughter]

Paul: So here he comes. What I want — here’s one thing I’ll add to links. Linking, you know, be careful who and how you link to, watch your page rank, watch your own page rank, watch page rank of who you’re linking to. You want to get hot — you want to get links of a high PR value if possible. Guess what? The PR 10’s are going to be harder to get than the PR 1’s.

Chris: Take a little more leg work and a little more effort.

Paul: Yes.

Chris: Here he is, the original top position snatcher, Charles Lewis. All right, so did you hear what he was talking about?

Chuck: Yeah, he was talking about link titles.

Chris: Link titles.

Chuck: More importantly one thing about link titles to remember is they’re being indexed, right?

Chris: Okay.

Chuck: So when you think about people who are disabled, people who use the screen readers.

Chris: Oh, yeah.

Chuck: It just looks like that and, you know, they have a mechanism that tells them when they want to click on something. And so if their link isn’t titled, the screen reader would get to it and they’re going to just like link.

Chris: Oh, for real?

Chuck: But if you title it, it will say, link to —

Chris: Link to, blah, blah, blah.

Chuck: — Houston Plumber, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Chris: Wow!

Chuck: You know, and so for the sake of assisting disabled people it helps. And of course it is another key phrase.

Chris: Yup. And —

Paul: That’s what’s up. Dude, I didn’t even think about that.

Chris: And Google gives some preference to —

Chuck: Same thing with image titles.

Paul: With image titles?

Chuck: Yeah.

Chris: Yeah.

Paul: I didn’t about that.

Chris: Yeah, a picture of a dog barking —

Chuck: Yeah, a picture of —

Chris: And I didn’t mention this, on alt tags, you know, you wonder and sometimes you can go to Google and you can search images and you wonder how — “Well, Google doesn’t know what the images are and how are they determining what goes there?” And there are two things, it’s the alt tags that are associated with that image and it’s also the text that’s around that image.

Chuck: Do you know what else it is, which is I was just telling —

Paul: I heard about this.

Chuck: — you about —

Paul: That’s Cory.

Chuck: Oh, that is his testimony.

Paul: Yeah. He busted my balls about my geography.

Chris: Your geography.

[Laughter]

Chuck: Okay. You could — if you give the image file name, you could —

Chris: I’ve heard all about that —

Chuck: — primary that JPEG.

Chris: Yeah.

Chuck: Exactly.

Chris: Don’t let it be right off of your camera, you know, image 84962 —

Paul: Yeah.

Chuck: Yeah.

Chris: — JPG. Give it an actual relevant title.

Chuck: Exactly.

Chris: That’s very true. And that’s — I mean there’s a lot of value of having your pictures there ‘cause sometimes you browse search engine those pictures and, you know, they may be looking for like really cool logo with an IEE in it and boom.

Paul: There we are.

[Laughter]

Paul: So, so far and we’re looking at a brand new website, we’re looking at the meta tags, the content, the links and I don’t know if we talked about this one, a re-direct, from index to root. What is it and why would you do it? And somebody here is brand new — this is their first podcast they ever listened to, why would they do that?

Chuck: Well, the first way to notice it is if — if they have the www of their domain name active and then there’s another www, wwwww. — that’s a lot of W’s there.

Paul: Yeah.

Chris: Yeah.

[Laughter]

Chuck: Houstonplumber.com and being there is just houstonplumber.com. If they’re going to two separate sites, there’s duplicate content.

Chris: Yeah. Potentially, yeah.

Chuck: Yeah. Secondly, you want to have either one of them forwarded to the other.

Chris: Okay. So when you say, if there are two separate sites, what you mean is if I type “www.houstonplumber.com” and it pulls up the homepage of houstonplumber.com, and then I just type “houstonplumber.com” and it doesn’t get forwarded to the www — www version, it just stays there and it’s the same page, duplicate content issue.

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